Oh. My. Fate?! (Bl, Volume 10, Part 1)

98 A Multitude of Scarce Information

An Bai slowly went through the information and then put the jade slip to the side. "It seems that there is no information on whether the dragons had their souls bound to those partners or not."

The official looked back up and inclined his head. "That kind of information, I'm afraid the gods wouldn't be privy to it."

An Bai furrowed his brows, not sure what to make of this. This matter of consulting the Jades of Love, it was a way to find out more, but if there was no indication if a certain soul had been bound or not, would it really be valuable information for them?

The official could see that he had his doubts and put down the jade slip he had been working on. "Scholar An Bai, I can imagine that you are disappointed to find only this amount of information. But this is the only starting point we have. Anyway, they give us at least the names of the people involved. Afterward, if there are cases that we deem to be important, we can ask the Palace of Fate for the scrolls of fate for them. That will give us further information, even though I can't guarantee what exactly will be contained in them. I know it is a lot of work that might not yield too much of a result, but right now, there isn't much more that we can try."

An Bai nodded. "I know. It isn't that I am unfamiliar with this kind of process. It is just that time is of the essence and I couldn't help but wonder if there is a faster way to do this. I'm sure I do not need to tell you but we are afraid of losing our king. He has reigned for so long and I don't even want to imagine what would ensue if something were to happen to him. The dragon realm ... I'm not sure how long it would take for us to recover from something like that. And considering what is currently going on in the demon realm, this isn't the time to find out."

The official furrowed his brows. "Yes, I recently heard news that the fight for the throne over there is getting worse. Right now, it really doesn't look good for demon king Jin Ling. I never would've thought I'd wish that guy luck but I sure hope that he will manage to hold onto the throne. He ... might be a demon but at least he doesn't seem intent on waging war against others like his opponent does. That Yong Hai is bad news all around."

An Bai nodded and picked up the next jade slip. "Well, that is something we can't influence. We can, however, make sure that we find out whatever we can before there will be a result over there. We'll just have to hurry up."

The official inclined his head and the two of them got back to work, working through one jade slip after the other.

Even with four people working together, they made decent progress. In any case, An Bai was a scholar, used to doing this kind of work, and the God of Justice had made sure to choose three officials that were equally well-suited to the task. In fact, the one that An Bai had spoken to was a senior official of his court, one that might even follow in his footsteps one day. As for the other two, they were at least on their way to becoming senior officials as well. As such, it was not a surprise that they managed to look through all the jade scrolls gathered so far in about half a day, coming up with a long list of names and circumstances.

When the last jade scroll had been put down, the senior official put all of them back into the chest and put it next to the door before he returned to the table. "Very well. I will have the chest sent back and the next one brought over. In the meantime, we should try to see if there is any kind of lead yet."

The others nodded and waited for him to give the instructions, using the time to look through their own lists.

When he finally returned and sat down, one of the others immediately spoke up. "I think that we should mostly focus on the ones that with the relationship intact. In that case, we can be sure that nothing would have happened to the dragon partner, right?"

The senior official narrowed his eyes and gave a hum. "That is true. Although the dragon king is currently in a situation where he assumes his partner to be dead. Currently because of the assassination attempt on His Highness but, later on, this will be because of the fact that His Highness's reincarnation won't be able to survive. So what we actually need is a dragon who has lost their partner, but was somehow able to survive. Would you agree with that, Scholar An Bai?"

An Bai pondered, not too sure about that either. "His Majesty's case is a little special. We do not know what will happen with Zhong Jing Yi but so far, at least His Highness is alive. This is merely a matter of his mind being confused. The illusion, in this case, is stronger than the reality. So I honestly don't know which case would be better for us to look at.

"Generally, I don't think that there is a way for a soul-bound dragon to survive their partner's death. That just isn't how it works. Sooner or later, they will take their life. There's just no way around that. We currently need to find somebody who survived not their partner's death but a situation close to that which ... admittedly won't be easy to find. And it might also not be the end result of the relationship. Something like that might have happened in the middle while true death followed later on."

The four of them fell silent, not quite sure how to go about that. There was information given, yes, but it wasn't as detailed as a scroll of fate might be, and it was impossible to tell what exactly had gone down before the final outcome.